


The Adventure of the Sworn Servitude

by methylviolet10b



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Period-Typical Racism, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 04:04:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2010279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/methylviolet10b/pseuds/methylviolet10b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Did you really think Jonathan Small was a reliable narrator? Written for JWP #23.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventure of the Sworn Servitude

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Heavily references "The Sign of the Four." Prejudice, racism, violence, and death.This was written in a huge rush. You have been warned. 
> 
> JWP #23: Eat Raw Meat and Dance His War-Dance. From the original ACD to modern-day adaptations, the treatment of non-white characters in Sherlock Holmes (examples including "The Sign of Four," "The Blind Banker") can be racially problematic if not downright racist. Here's your chance to "fix" such a portrayal, or to deal with the subject of race from any version of SH (Sally Donovan or Joan Watson might have an earful to tell you, or the two African-American protagonists of the comic-book series Watson and Holmes).

It was a matter of honor.  
  
It has ever been the way among my people that if another saves your life, your life is no longer your own, but belongs instead to the one who saved you. No matter what you once were: hunter, warrior, husband, father; a loved and treasured member of your village; the sole remaining child of your aged mother, who sits on the council and commands men with a word; all that must end, for you no longer belong to any but the one.  
  
And surely I must have angered the gods, for my savior was one of the hideous pale demons.  
  
When I felt the sickness coming upon me, I took myself away from my village, so that the sickness might not jump from me to my wife, children, or any others. It is our way, the way of the brave. In isolation I would pray, and I would either die or live as the gods decreed.   
  
I had not dreamed of the evil, third choice that was forced upon me: that I would be discovered in my sickness by a group of the ugly demon people, and that they would capture me in my weakened state and bring me to one of their horrible stinking camps. I expected to die when they gave me to a grotesquely pale, tall demon with a great smoke-cloud of hair and who had a piece of wood where his left leg should have been.  
  
I _wanted_ to die when I realized that this demon seemed intent on saving my life.  
  
What worse fate could there be than to have to live the remainder of my days the slave of a demon? But his magic was too powerful. Despite all I could do to resist, he healed me of my sickness, cured me of my weakness, and therefore bound me to serve him. He knew this, too, for he set me free after healing me, knowing I would come back to him wherever he was.  
  
I took one journey only, to bid farewell to my old life. The joy at my return to my village swiftly turned to horror as I confessed myself as _tonga_ , no name. For I no longer had a name, or honor, or life to call my own; merely servitude that could not end until my death. Slowly, sadly, my people turned their backs to me, as was proper, but not before I saw the sorrow on my mother’s face, the tears in the eyes of my hunt-brother, the silent keen shaking the flesh of my beloved wife’s body, swelling with our child, one I would never see. I gathered up the belongings I must take with me, for all I owned now belonged to the demon, just as I did. I heard the wails of my living children as I walked away, before they were drowned out by all of my people singing the death-chant for the man I had been.  
  
The demon who now owned me was clever. He learned enough of the language of the people to give me commands, and in turn forced me to learn enough demon-speak to know how to obey him, and spy for him, and call him Master. I discovered that he was a prisoner of other ugly demons here, and that he wished escape. I helped him do so, as I was bound to do. And in so doing, I discovered an even worse thing:  
  
This demon was a killer without honor, without mercy, even more so than was usual for his kind. He was hideous in appearance but worse still on the inside.  
  
I saw him strike down one of his fellow-demons with the wood he used as a leg. This other demon was no friend to my master, but he slew him as one would strike down a beast in the hunt, not an honorable foe. Nor did he stop to give honor to the fallen, neither tasting his flesh in order to absorb his courage as we do with our enemies, nor giving thanks to his spirit for sustenance as we do for our prey. He merely left the corpse without a word or a prayer.  
  
It boded ill for my service, and so it proved. My master took me from one awful place to another. They live in terrible places, these demons: lands where there is much stone, but little useful for tools; there are no trees or shrubs for food, or herds of animals to hunt; where _everything_ seems to belong to one demon or another, even the ground itself, and no one can live free. My master could never settle in one place for long, for he was mean-spirited, cowardly, and covetous, and never content. I hunted for him as I could, and brought things he demanded, and even killed on his command, and endured his mocking praise and frequent abuse as best as I could. Other demons despised him for the most part. Of course they despised me too, as belonging to such a miserable creature. I could not entirely blame them, though it did not make their scorn and malice any easier to bear.  
  
It is hard to maintain any sense of personal honor when you serve one that has none, and when you are constantly among demons who have no sense of honor either, and are filthy and stupid besides. It would have been so easy to hate them all, and indeed I hated most of them, my master most of any. They are demons, and horrible to look at, and even more horrible to live among. But occasionally I would see kindness among them, and even traces of honor, although not in the ways that my people counted honor.  
  
I learned that a few demons cared for their spawn as tenderly as my people care for our children, although even in this they were strange and backwards, for my people care for _all_ children, not just their own by birth. I saw that demon-spawn die early and often, as our own children do, despite our care; and that this causes grief to some demons even as it did to us, when our children went pale and still.  
  
I heard fishing demons sing songs giving thanks for their catch, a pale echo of the thanks we of the people would give to the plants and animals that sustain us when we took them in the hunt or harvest.  
  
And when my master took me to the most horrible place of all, the land of wet and cold, the gods opened my inner eyes and I began to see with the wise-sight. At first I was not sure if this was yet another curse laid on me by the angry gods, for what good could such a gift do me among the demons? If I were with my people, I would join the elders in council, but my master did not understand me when I spoke of it. He merely cursed and struck me and ordered me to silence.  
  
But it gave me comfort, to see the glow of wisdom or truth or honor around some few of the demons, and to know that these things existed even in their fetid dens. It helped me protect my master – and therefore myself – from those demons even more evil than he, and there were some such. It made me not mind quite as much when my master ordered me to climb one of the stone burrows the demons called houses, and kill the one in the den before sending down a rope for him through what I had learned were called windows, for I could see that this demon was just as mean-spirited and vicious as my master himself.  
  
(For all that, I killed him swiftly, mercifully, with one of the death-thorns, and struck him the ritual blow on the head with my spirit-axe while I chanted the victory, so that his spirit would know I honored him in death and fly free before my master arrived. I left the spirit-axe next to him, as tradition demanded, but it mattered little; even in this cold land of demons, wood and stone and grasses could be found.)  
  
My master beat me when I would not touch the metal box. The wise-sight showed me the ill fortune that lay upon it, and I needed no further curses in my already accursed life. I tried to warn him, as my service demanded, but he would not listen. I did aid him in lowering the box to the ground once he tied it with the rope and put it out the window, just as I helped steady him on his climb down. I then returned to the den, drew up the rope, and closed and locked the window as my master instructed before leaving the way that I came.  
  
I lost a packet of my death-darts in my rush to return to my master. This vexed me, but I had many more still, despite the many seasons since I last saw my land. I knew when I left that I would need enough for a lifetime of hunting, and I did not use them nearly as often among the demons as I would have as a hunter of my people.  
  
It was the wise-sight that showed me the hunt-brothers, powerful, courageous, and bound together in pursuit of their rightful prey – demons like my master. I saw, too, that to strike against one of them would bring vengeance and death. Even if you struck down one of the demon-pair, the other would never rest in his pursuit. In that way, they reminded me of my own hunt-brother, and I felt a pang of bitter loneliness for all I had lost.  
  
But when my master snarled “Tonga, _kill!_ ”, I did not hesitate. I obeyed his command, even though the speed of the demon-boat made it nearly impossible to strike with any surety. I raised my pipe and blew one of my death-darts at the taller of the two demons, the leader of the hunt. I sensed that the smaller of the two had the deadlier arm, but that it was the taller who posed the greater danger to my master.  
  
And I knew, even as I blew, that I had bought my own death.  
  
I felt the burning pain of the smaller one’s bullet as it struck me. The impact sent me over the side and into the terrible cold waters of the river. And as the demon-craft swept by, I caught the gaze of that demon, acknowledging his victory, and saw that knowledge in his eyes.  
  
It was enough. Honor was satisfied.  
  
Now I lie here in the river feeling my strength seep away. There will be no saving me a second time. My life is done. The waters around me warm with my blood and my fading strength, and I pray that they will sweep me away, carry me to the lands of my gods, where I may rest at last.  
  
My servitude, my bondage, is over.  
  
It was a matter of honor.


End file.
